NOT ALONE WITH STEELY DAN

By Carola Dibbell

Reprinted from The Village Voice November 1995

Filing into Roseland to hear Steely Dan three Saturdays ago, I think of
Lester Bang's Elvis obit: "So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse,
he concluded. "I will say good-bye to you." The last time I saw this band in
concert was just months before they launched almost two decades of not
touring. But they didn't go away. They spent their seclusion in my living
room. They spent it in my car stereo, on my chiropractor's sound system, in
department store boutiques. When I closed my eyes for plane takeoff and
opened my mouth for the high speed drill, they were there, smelling like
mouthwash and Herculon, sounding like art and cheese. But this is the first
time I'll share Steely Dan with a live audience in 21 years. So I don't
bother saying hello to Steely Dan. I say hello to you.

It was 1974 when Steely Dan, then a two-year-old "bad-vibes" band that
combined enigma and hook in a string of hits, decided to quit the road.
Within a year, they'd stripped down to Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, then
released four more albums with session musicians before divorcing altogether
in 1980. The next 15 years saw three solo albums, including Fagen's brilliant
The Nightfly, but was basically a time of block. Then, in 1993, a new Steely
Dan - Fagen and Becker, now in their forties, backed by a big band - started
to tour again. And when they did, they sold out over night.

This is the Steely Dan story: Technopathic misanthropes, easy to
misunderstand, the music was somewhere between "too cheesy" and "too
bizarre," as Fagen lamented upon the release of Pretzel Logic. "We've more or
less abandoned hope of being one of the big, important rock 'n roll groups."
This explains why they have five platinum albums. This explains why they are
so hard to explain that the conventional critical wisdom , always stressing
how hard they are to explain, always makes the same easily understood points.
"Hippie muzak," "Boprock" - the strange-bedfellow argument. Under this
murkily elegant band lurk even murkier secrets, such as glee club harmonies
and Les Baxter. Under the impenetrable sadness, Danish modern. Under Horace
Silver, Burt Bacharach. Under Wayne Shorter-era Miles Davis, Sketches of
Spain. Hipsters in secret love nest with rink-a-dink. Some secret - the word
"cheesy" gets more play in the Dan press kit than in The Betty Crocker Fondue
Cookbook.

I've gone back and forth between such paradoxes so many times I am convinced
they are epiphany-free. I hardly even wonder why I'm always so glad to hear
the sound of Steely Dan, whether in proven lifesavers like "Brooklyn (Owes
the Charmer Under Me)" or diffuse material I couldn't name from Fagen's less
wonderful Kamakiriad. Becker and Fagen shuffle musical and verbal cliche's
with merciless irresolution until the suspense is killing me: it's generic,
no it's lovely, no it's Steely Dan! This doesn't even puzzle me any more.
What does is why I can't put my finger on whatever it is in the music that
links me to its millions of other fans, and what that says about them - and
me.

From my press seats on the side dais, I get a view of the thousand-plus who
cared enough to buy their own tickets. Median age 29 or 30 - young ones
probably came in on late AOR in the early 80's. Lots of craniums and
steel-rimmed glasses. Clean but not clean-cut. Not exactly nondescript. Just
not giving anything away.

Questions flit across my mind like shy conversation on a first date. I like
waiting rooms, how about you? I actually like "The Shadow of Your Smile," how
about you? Astor Piazzolla, how about you? Yet the truth is, anonymity has
been such a necessary feature of my fandom for Steely Dan over the years that
I relinquish it now with extreme disorientation. When Fagen comments, about
midway through the show, "What a relief to play for actual people," I'm
touched but ambivalent. I've spent so much time alone with this voice that
his actual person seems like an intruder. Sometimes I have to look away to
hear the ache in the throat, the slight lisp that I know as well as my own
living room speakers. When I do, I face the bobbing, transfixed sea of
craniums - my secret sharers- and the invasion of my privacy is complete. But
inside that invasion, like the sound of Steely Dan when you're on hold, lies
a puzzling comfort. So it turns out you live in a motel. That doesn't mean
you're not alone.

Forget the haircut and Becker has barely changed. Fagen is muscular and wiry,
if grizzled. These guys were always old for their years, so the revelations
of aging are minimized, and anyhow, take it from me, 50 is when it happens.
Opening with Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-oo," the band looks like
R. Crumb's jazz cards - cartoon versions of old time jazz musicians. This is
a nice epiphany: already we belong to the ages. Otherwise, it's basically an
epiphany-free evening. Irony-free, too.

With the backing of 10 - surprise surprise - crack musicians, including
Weather Report's Peter Erskine on drums, Jazz Passenger Bill Ware on vibes,
Chris Potter on sax, the spectacular Drew Zingg on guitar, and bassist Tom
Barney ("He made a mistake, once," Becker teased; Barney knew the date),
Becker and Fagen's set went on for nearly two hours. It emphasized their AOR
- conquering Aja mode, and included material from both leaders' solo albums
(not, unhappily, The Nightfly), but did dip back, although the oldies were,
that's right, nostalgia - free as well - sharpened, slightly restructured,
and regrooved. Zingg's "Bodhisattva" solo added new jazzy phrasing, dribbles
and halts, to the old insistent boogie. "Reelin' in the years" had some new
sweet-and-sour tensions, and "Do It Again," I'm not sure why, sounded less
like pathological compulsion than reason to hope. Most of what they played is
on ALIVE IN AMERICA (Giant), the new, first (naturally), excellent
(naturally) live album they recorded on their 1993-94 tour. It sounded better
truly live. And I'll take the complete studio works they've remastered for
the CITIZEN STEELY DAN (MCA) box any time.

"We're playing old stuff," Fagen quipped, "because we don't have any new
stuff. We're taking suggestions for song concepts." Here are some of mine.
Formally, try shorter with fewer sax fills - just exercise, of course.
Thematically, the Apple of the 90s oozes Steely Dan potential. Main Street,
Flushing. Sweatshops in Soho. Russian gangsters run a jazz club (Moscow or
Brighton Beach, your choice.) Rock star (male) marries corporate lawyer. The
demise of Medicare. Or leave New York and try Border-town. See you when we
see you, boys. And where.